The Man in the Black Suit

I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to mewhen I was very young—only nine years old. It was 1914, the sum-mer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years beforeAmerica got into World War I. I’ve never told anyone about whathappened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will . . . atleast not with my mouth. I’ve decided to write it down, though, in thisbook which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can’t write long,because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength,but I don’t think it will take long.

Later, someone may find what I have written. That seems likely tome, as it is pretty much human nature to look in a book marked DIARY

after its owner has passed along. So yes—my words will probably beread. A better question is whether or not anyone will believe them.Almost certainly not, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not belief I’m inter-ested in but freedom. Writing can give that, I’ve found. For twentyyears I wrote a column called “Long Ago and Far Away” for the Cas-tle Rock Call, and I know that sometimes it works that way—whatyou write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographsleft in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white.

I pray for that sort of release.A man in his nineties should be well past the terrors of childhood,

but as my infirmities slowly creep up on me, like waves lickingcloser and closer to some indifferently built castle of sand, that terri-ble face grows clearer and clearer in my mind’s eye. It glows like adark star in the constellations of my childhood. What I might havedone yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nurs-

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ing home, what I might have said to them or they to me . . . thosethings are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows everclearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said. I don’t wantto think of him but I can’t help it, and sometimes at night my oldheart beats so hard and so fast I think it will tear itself right clear ofmy chest. So I uncap my fountain pen and force my trembling oldhand to write this pointless anecdote in the diary one of my great-grandchildren—I can’t remember her name for sure, at least not rightnow, but I know it starts with an S—gave to me last Christmas, andwhich I have never written in until now. Now I will write in it. I willwrite the story of how I met the man in the black suit on the bank ofCastle Stream one afternoon in the summer of 1914.

The town of Motton was a different world in those days—more dif-ferent than I could ever tell you. That was a world without airplanesdroning overhead, a world almost without cars and trucks, a worldwhere the skies were not cut into lanes and slices by overhead powerlines.

There was not a single paved road in the whole town, and the busi-ness district consisted of nothing but Corson’s General Store, Thut’sLivery & Hardware, the Methodist Church at Christ’s Corner, theschool, the town hall, and Harry’s Restaurant half a mile down fromthere, which my mother called, with unfailing disdain, “the liquorhouse.”

Mostly, though, the difference was in how people lived—howapart they were. I’m not sure people born after the middle of the twen-tieth century could quite credit that, although they might say theycould, to be polite to old folks like me. There were no phones in west-ern Maine back then, for one thing. The first one wouldn’t beinstalled for another five years, and by the time there was one in ourhouse, I was nineteen and going to college at the University ofMaine in Orono.

But that is only the roof of the thing. There was no doctor closerthan Casco, and no more than a dozen houses in what you would calltown. There were no neighborhoods (I’m not even sure we knew the

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word, although we had a verb—neighboring—that described churchfunctions and barn dances), and open fields were the exception ratherthan the rule. Out of town the houses were farms that stood far apartfrom each other, and from December until middle March we mostlyhunkered down in the little pockets of stovewarmth we called fami-lies. We hunkered and listened to the wind in the chimney andhoped no one would get sick or break a leg or get a headful of badideas, like the farmer over in Castle Rock who had chopped up his wifeand kids three winters before and then said in court that the ghostsmade him do it. In those days before the Great War, most of Mottonwas woods and bog, dark long places full of moose and mosquitoes,snakes and secrets. In those days there were ghosts everywhere.

This thing I’m telling about happened on a Saturday. My father gaveme a whole list of chores to do, including some that would have beenDan’s, if he’d still been alive. He was my only brother, and he’d diedof being stung by a bee. A year had gone by, and still my motherwouldn’t hear that. She said it was something else, had to havebeen, that no one ever died of being stung by a bee. When MamaSweet, the oldest lady in the Methodist Ladies’ Aid, tried to tell her—at the church supper the previous winter, this was—that the samething had happened to her favorite uncle back in ’73, my motherclapped her hands over her ears, got up, and walked out of thechurch basement. She’d never been back since, either, and nothing myfather could say to her would change her mind. She claimed she wasdone with church, and that if she ever had to see Helen Robichaudagain (that was Mama Sweet’s real name), she would slap her eyes out.She wouldn’t be able to help herself, she said.

That day, Dad wanted me to lug wood for the cookstove, weed thebeans and the cukes, pitch hay out of the loft, get two jugs of waterto put in the cold pantry, and scrape as much old paint off the cellarbulkhead as I could. Then, he said, I could go fishing, if I didn’t mindgoing by myself—he had to go over and see Bill Eversham aboutsome cows. I said I sure didn’t mind going by myself, and my Dadsmiled like that didn’t surprise him so very much. He’d given me a

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bamboo pole the week before—not because it was my birthday oranything, but just because he liked to give me things, sometimes—and I was wild to try it in Castle Stream, which was by far thetroutiest brook I’d ever fished.

“But don’t you go too far in the woods,” he told me. “Not beyondwhere it splits.”

“No, sir.”“Promise me.”“Yessir, I promise.”“Now promise your mother.”We were standing on the back stoop; I had been bound for the

springhouse with the waterjugs when my Dad stopped me. Now heturned me around to face my mother, who was standing at the mar-ble counter in a flood of strong morning sunshine falling through thedouble windows over the sink. There was a curl of hair lying acrossthe side of her forehead and touching her eyebrow—you see how wellI remember it all? The bright light turned that little curl to filamentsof gold and made me want to run to her and put my arms aroundher. In that instant I saw her as a woman, saw her as my father musthave seen her. She was wearing a housedress with little red roses allover it, I remember, and she was kneading bread. Candy Bill, our lit-tle black Scottie dog, was standing alertly beside her feet, looking up,waiting for anything that might drop. My mother was looking at me.

“I promise,” I said.She smiled, but it was the worried kind of smile she always seemed

to make since my father brought Dan back from the west field in hisarms. My father had come sobbing and bare-chested. He had takenoff his shirt and draped it over Dan’s face, which had swelled andturned color. My boy! he had been crying. Oh, look at my boy! Jesus, lookat my boy! I remember that as if it had been yesterday. It was the onlytime I ever heard my Dad take the Savior’s name in vain.

“What do you promise, Gary?” she asked.“Promise not to go no further than where it forks, ma’am.”“Any further.”“Any.”

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She gave me a patient look, saying nothing as her hands went onworking in the dough, which now had a smooth, silky look.

“I promise not to go any further than where it forks, ma’am.”“Thank you, Gary,” she said. “And try to remember that gram-

mar is for the world as well as for school.”“Yes, ma’am.”

Candy Bill followed me as I did my chores, and sat between my feetas I bolted my lunch, looking up at me with the same attentivenesshe had shown my mother while she was kneading her bread, but whenI got my new bamboo pole and my old, splintery creel and started outof the dooryard, he stopped and only stood in the dust by an old rollof snowfence, watching. I called him but he wouldn’t come. Heyapped a time or two, as if telling me to come back, but that was all.

“Stay, then,” I said, trying to sound as if I didn’t care. I did,though, at least a little. Candy Bill always went fishing with me.

My mother came to the door and looked out at me with her lefthand held up to shade her eyes. I can see her that way still, and it’s likelooking at a photograph of someone who later became unhappy, ordied suddenly. “You mind your Dad now, Gary!”

“Yes, ma’am, I will.”She waved. I waved, too. Then I turned my back on her and

walked away.

The sun beat down on my neck, hard and hot, for the first quarter-mileor so, but then I entered the woods, where double shadow fell over theroad and it was cool and fir-smelling and you could hear the wind hiss-ing through the deep needled groves. I walked with my pole on myshoulder like boys did back then, holding my creel in my other handlike a valise or a salesman’s sample-case. About two miles into thewoods along a road which was really nothing but a double rut with agrassy strip growing up the center hump, I began to hear the hurried,eager gossip of Castle Stream. I thought of trout with bright speckledbacks and pure white bellies, and my heart went up in my chest.

The stream flowed under a little wooden bridge, and the banks

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leading down to the water were steep and brushy. I worked my waydown carefully, holding on where I could and digging my heels in. Iwent down out of summer and back into midspring, or so it felt. Thecool rose gently off the water, and a green smell like moss. When I gotto the edge of the water I only stood there for a little while, breath-ing deep of that mossy smell and watching the dragonflies circle andthe skitterbugs skate. Then, farther down, I saw a trout leap at a but-terfly—a good big brookie, maybe fourteen inches long—and remem-bered I hadn’t come here just to sightsee.

I walked along the bank, following the current, and wet my line forthe first time with the bridge still in sight upstream. Something jerkedthe tip of my pole down a time or two and ate half my worm, but hewas too sly for my nine-year-old hands—or maybe just not hungryenough to be careless—so I went on.

I stopped at two or three other places before I got to the placewhere Castle Stream forks, going southwest into Castle Rock andsoutheast into Kashwakamak Township, and at one of them I caughtthe biggest trout I have ever caught in my life, a beauty that measurednineteen inches from tip to tail on the little ruler I kept in my creel.That was a monster of a brook trout, even for those days.

If I had accepted this as gift enough for one day and gone back, Iwould not be writing now (and this is going to turn out longer thanI thought it would, I see that already), but I didn’t. Instead I saw tomy catch right then and there as my father had shown me—cleaningit, placing it on dry grass at the bottom of the creel, then laying dampgrass on top of it—and went on. I did not, at age nine, think thatcatching a nineteen-inch brook trout was particularly remarkable,although I do remember being amazed that my line had not brokenwhen I, netless as well as artless, had hauled it out and swung ittoward me in a clumsy tail-flapping arc.

Ten minutes later, I came to the place where the stream split inthose days (it is long gone now; there is a settlement of duplexhomes where Castle Stream once went its course, and a districtgrammar school as well, and if there is a stream it goes in darkness),dividing around a huge gray rock nearly the size of our outhouse.

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There was a pleasant flat space here, grassy and soft, overlooking whatmy Dad and I called South Branch. I squatted on my heels, droppedmy line into the water, and almost immediately snagged a fine rain-bow trout. He wasn’t the size of my brookie—only a foot or so—buta good fish, just the same. I had it cleaned out before the gills hadstopped flexing, stored it in my creel, and dropped my line back intothe water.

This time there was no immediate bite so I leaned back, looking upat the blue stripe of sky I could see along the stream’s course. Cloudsfloated by, west to east, and I tried to think what they looked like. Isaw a unicorn, then a rooster, then a dog that looked a little like CandyBill. I was looking for the next one when I drowsed off.

Or maybe slept. I don’t know for sure. All I know is that a tug on myline so strong it almost pulled the bamboo pole out of my hand waswhat brought me back into the afternoon. I sat up, clutched the pole,and suddenly became aware that something was sitting on the tip ofmy nose. I crossed my eyes and saw a bee. My heart seemed to falldead in my chest, and for a horrible second I was sure I was going towet my pants.

The tug on my line came again, stronger this time, but althoughI maintained my grip on the end of the pole so it wouldn’t be pulledinto the stream and perhaps carried away (I think I even had the pres-ence of mind to snub the line with my forefinger), I made no effort topull in my catch. All of my horrified attention was fixed on the fatblack-and-yellow thing that was using my nose as a rest-stop.

I slowly poked out my lower lip and blew upward. The bee ruffleda little but kept its place. I blew again and it ruffled again . . . but thistime it also seemed to shift impatiently, and I didn’t dare blow any-more, for fear it would lose its temper completely and give me a shot.It was too close for me to focus on what it was doing, but it was easyto imagine it ramming its stinger into one of my nostrils and shoot-ing its poison up toward my eyes. And my brain.

A terrible idea came to me: that this was the very bee which hadkilled my brother. I knew it wasn’t true, and not only because honey-

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bees probably didn’t live longer than a single year (except maybe forthe queens; about them I was not so sure). It couldn’t be true becausebees died when they stung, and even at nine I knew it. Their stingerswere barbed, and when they tried to fly away after doing the deed,they tore themselves apart. Still, the idea stayed. This was a specialbee, a devil-bee, and it had come back to finish the other of Albion andLoretta’s two boys.

And here is something else: I had been stung by bees before, andalthough the stings had swelled more than is perhaps usual (I can’treally say for sure), I had never died of them. That was only for mybrother, a terrible trap which had been laid for him in his very mak-ing, a trap which I had somehow escaped. But as I crossed my eyesuntil they hurt in an effort to focus on the bee, logic did not exist. Itwas the bee that existed, only that, the bee that had killed my brother,killed him so bad that my father had slipped down the straps of hisoveralls so he could take off his shirt and cover Dan’s swelled,engorged face. Even in the depths of his grief he had done that,because he didn’t want his wife to see what had become of her first-born. Now the bee had returned, and now it would kill me. It wouldkill me and I would die in convulsions on the bank, flopping just asa brookie flops after you take the hook out of its mouth.

As I sat there trembling on the edge of panic—of simply boltingto my feet and then bolting anywhere—there came a report frombehind me. It was as sharp and peremptory as a pistol-shot, but Iknew it wasn’t a pistol-shot; it was someone clapping his hands. Onesingle clap. At the moment it came, the bee tumbled off my nose andfell into my lap. It lay there on my pants with its legs sticking up andits stinger a threatless black thread against the old scuffed brown ofthe corduroy. It was dead as a doornail, I saw that at once. At the samemoment, the pole gave another tug—the hardest yet—and I almostlost it again.

I grabbed it with both hands and gave it a big stupid yank thatwould have made my father clutch his head with both hands, if he hadbeen there to see it. A rainbow trout, a good bit larger than the oneI had already caught, rose out of the water in a wet, writhing flash,

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spraying fine drops of water from its filament of tail—it looked likeone of those romanticized fishing pictures they used to put on the cov-ers of men’s magazines like True and Man’s Adventure back in the for-ties and fifties. At that moment hauling in a big one was about the lastthing on my mind, however, and when the line snapped and the fishfell back into the stream, I barely noticed. I looked over my shoulderto see who had clapped. A man was standing above me, at the edgeof the trees. His face was very long and pale. His black hair wascombed tight against his skull and parted with rigorous care on theleft side of his narrow head. He was very tall. He was wearing a blackthree-piece suit, and I knew right away that he was not a humanbeing, because his eyes were the orangey-red of flames in a woodstove.I don’t just mean the irises, because he had no irises, and no pupils, andcertainly no whites. His eyes were completely orange—an orange thatshifted and flickered. And it’s really too late not to say exactly whatI mean, isn’t it? He was on fire inside, and his eyes were like the lit-tle isinglass portholes you sometimes see in stove doors.

My bladder let go, and the scuffed brown the dead bee was lyingon went a darker brown. I was hardly aware of what had happened,and I couldn’t take my eyes off the man standing on top of the bankand looking down at me, the man who had walked out of thirty milesof trackless western Maine woods in a fine black suit and narrow shoesof gleaming leather. I could see the watch-chain looped across his vestglittering in the summer sunshine. There was not so much as a singlepine-needle on him. And he was smiling at me.

“Why, it’s a fisherboy!” he cried in a mellow, pleasing voice.“Imagine that! Are we well-met, fisherboy?”

“Hello, sir,” I said. The voice that came out of me did not tremble,but it didn’t sound like my voice, either. It sounded older. LikeDan’s voice, maybe. Or my father’s, even. And all I could think wasthat maybe he would let me go if I pretended not to see what he was.If I pretended I didn’t see there were flames glowing and dancingwhere his eyes should have been.

“I’ve saved you a nasty sting, perhaps,” he said, and then, to myhorror, he came down the bank to where I sat with a dead bee in my

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wet lap and a bamboo fishing pole in my nerveless hands. His slick-soled city shoes should have slipped on the low, grassy weeds whichdressed the steep bank, but they didn’t; nor did they leave tracksbehind, I saw. Where his feet had touched—or seemed to touch—there was not a single broken twig, crushed leaf, or trampled shoe-shape.

Even before he reached me, I recognized the aroma baking up fromthe skin under the suit—the smell of burned matches. The smell ofsulfur. The man in the black suit was the Devil. He had walked outof the deep woods between Motton and Kashwakamak, and now hewas standing here beside me. From the corner of one eye I could seea hand as pale as the hand of a store window dummy. The fingers werehideously long.

He hunkered beside me on his hams, his knees popping just asthe knees of any normal man might, but when he moved his handsso they dangled between his knees, I saw that each of those long fin-gers ended in what was not a fingernail but a long yellow claw.

“You didn’t answer my question, fisherboy,” he said in his mellowvoice. It was, now that I think of it, like the voice of one of those radioannouncers on the big-band shows years later, the ones that would sellGeritol and Serutan and Ovaltine and Dr. Grabow pipes. “Are wewell-met?”

“Please don’t hurt me,” I whispered, in a voice so low I could barelyhear it. I was more afraid than I could ever write down, more afraidthan I want to remember . . . but I do. I do. It never even crossed mymind to hope I was having a dream, although I might have, I sup-pose, if I had been older. But I wasn’t older; I was nine, and I knewthe truth when it squatted down on its hunkers beside me. I knew ahawk from a handsaw, as my father would have said. The man whohad come out of the woods on that Saturday afternoon in midsummerwas the Devil, and inside the empty holes of his eyes, his brains wereburning.

“Oh, do I smell something?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard me . . .although I knew he had. “Do I smell something . . . wet?”

He leaned forward toward me with his nose stuck out, like some-

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one who means to smell a flower. And I noticed an awful thing; asthe shadow of his head travelled over the bank, the grass beneath itturned yellow and died. He lowered his head toward my pants andsniffed. His glaring eyes half-closed, as if he had inhaled some sub-lime aroma and wanted to concentrate on nothing but that.

“Oh, bad!” he cried. “Lovely-bad!” And then he chanted: “Opal!Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary’s lemonade!” Then he threwhimself on his back in the little flat place and laughed wildly. It wasthe sound of a lunatic.

I thought about running, but my legs seemed two counties awayfrom my brain. I wasn’t crying, though; I had wet my pants like ababy, but I wasn’t crying. I was too scared to cry. I suddenly knew thatI was going to die, and probably painfully, but the worst of it was thatthat might not be the worst of it.

The worst of it might come later. After I was dead.He sat up suddenly, the smell of burnt matches fluffing out from

his suit and making me feel all gaggy in my throat. He looked at mesolemnly from his narrow white face and burning eyes, but there wasa sense of laughter about him, too. There was always that sense oflaughter about him.

“Sad news, fisherboy,” he said. “I’ve come with sad news.”I could only look at him—the black suit, the fine black shoes, the

long white fingers that ended not in nails but in talons.“Your mother is dead.”“No!” I cried. I thought of her making bread, of the curl lying

across her forehead and just touching her eyebrow, standing there inthe strong morning sunlight, and the terror swept over me again . . .but not for myself this time. Then I thought of how she’d lookedwhen I set off with my fishing pole, standing in the kitchen doorwaywith her hand shading her eyes, and how she had looked to me inthat moment like a photograph of someone you expected to seeagain but never did. “No, you lie!” I screamed.

He smiled—the sadly patient smile of a man who has often beenaccused falsely. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “It was the same thing thathappened to your brother, Gary. It was a bee.”

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“No, that’s not true,” I said, and now I did begin to cry. “She’s old,she’s thirty-five, if a bee-sting could kill her the way it did Danny shewould have died a long time ago and you’re a lying bastard!”

I had called the Devil a lying bastard. On some level I was awareof this, but the entire front of my mind was taken up by the enormityof what he’d said. My mother dead? He might as well have told methat there was a new ocean where the Rockies had been. But Ibelieved him. On some level I believed him completely, as we alwaysbelieve, on some level, the worst thing our hearts can imagine.

“I understand your grief, little fisherboy, but that particular argu-ment just doesn’t hold water, I’m afraid.” He spoke in a tone of boguscomfort that was horrible, maddening, without remorse or pity. “Aman can go his whole life without seeing a mockingbird, you know,but does that mean mockingbirds don’t exist? Your mother—”

A fish jumped below us. The man in the black suit frowned, thenpointed a finger at it. The trout convulsed in the air, its body bend-ing so strenuously that for a split-second it appeared to be snappingat its own tail, and when it fell back into Castle Stream it was float-ing lifelessly, dead. It struck the big gray rock where the watersdivided, spun around twice in the whirlpool eddy that formed there,and then floated off in the direction of Castle Rock. Meanwhile, theterrible stranger turned his burning eyes on me again, his thin lipspulled back from tiny rows of sharp teeth in a cannibal smile.

“Your mother simply went through her entire life without beingstung by a bee,” he said. “But then—less than an hour ago, actually—one flew in through the kitchen window while she was taking thebread out of the oven and putting it on the counter to cool.”

“No, I won’t hear this, I won’t hear this, I won’t!”I raised my hands and clapped them over my ears. He pursed his

lips as if to whistle and blew at me gently. It was only a little breath,but the stench was foul beyond belief—clogged sewers, outhousesthat have never known a single sprinkle of lime, dead chickens aftera flood.

My hands fell away from the sides of my face.“Good,” he said. “You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear

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this, my little fisherboy. It was your mother who passed that fatalweakness on to your brother Dan; you got some of it, but you also gota protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed.” Hepursed his lips again, only this time, he made a cruelly comic little tsk-tsk sound instead of blowing his nasty breath at me. “So, although Idon’t like to speak ill of the dead, it’s almost a case of poetic justice,isn’t it? After all, she killed your brother Dan as surely as if she had puta gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”

“No,” I whispered. “No, it isn’t true.”“I assure you it is,” he said. “The bee flew in the window and lit on

her neck. She slapped at it before she even knew what she wasdoing—you were wiser than that, weren’t you, Gary?—and the beestung her. She felt her throat start to close up at once. That’s whathappens, you know, to people who are allergic to bee-venom. Theirthroats close and they drown in the open air. That’s why Dan’s facewas so swollen and purple. That’s why your father covered it with hisshirt.”

I stared at him, now incapable of speech. Tears streamed down mycheeks. I didn’t want to believe him, and knew from my churchschooling that the devil is the father of lies, but I did believe him, justthe same. I believed he had been standing there in our dooryard, look-ing in the kitchen window, as my mother fell to her knees, clutchingat her swollen throat while Candy Bill danced around her, barkingshrilly.

“She made the most wonderfully awful noises,” the man in theblack suit said reflectively, “and she scratched her face quite badly,I’m afraid. Her eyes bulged out like a frog’s eyes. She wept.” Hepaused, then added: “She wept as she died, isn’t that sweet? Andhere’s the most beautiful thing of all. After she was dead . . . after shehad been lying on the floor for fifteen minutes or so with no soundbut the stove ticking and with that little stick of a bee-stinger stillpoking out of the side of her neck—so small, so small—do you knowwhat Candy Bill did? That little rascal licked away her tears. First onone side . . . and then on the other.”

He looked out at the stream for a moment, his face sad and

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thoughtful. Then he turned back to me and his expression of bereave-ment disappeared like a dream. His face was as slack and avid as theface of a corpse that has died hungry. His eyes blazed. I could see hissharp little teeth between his pale lips.

“I’m starving,” he said abruptly. “I’m going to kill you and tear youopen and eat your guts, little fisherboy. What do you think aboutthat?”

No, I tried to say, please, no, but no sound came out. He meant todo it, I saw. He really meant to do it.

“I’m just so hungry,” he said, both petulant and teasing. “And youwon’t want to live without your precious mommy, anyhow, take myword for it. Because your father’s the sort of man who’ll have to havesome warm hole to stick it in, believe me, and if you’re the only oneavailable, you’re the one who’ll have to serve. I’ll save you all that dis-comfort and unpleasantness. Also, you’ll go to Heaven, think ofthat. Murdered souls always go to Heaven. So we’ll both be servingGod this afternoon, Gary. Isn’t that nice?”

He reached for me again with his long, pale hands, and withoutthinking what I was doing, I flipped open the top of my creel,pawed all the way down to the bottom, and brought out the mon-ster brookie I’d caught earlier—the one I should have been satisfiedwith. I held it out to him blindly, my fingers in the red slit of its bellyfrom which I had removed its insides as the man in the black suithad threatened to remove mine. The fish’s glazed eye stared dream-ily at me, the gold ring around the black center reminding me of mymother’s wedding ring. And in that moment I saw her lying in hercoffin with the sun shining off the wedding band and knew it wastrue—she had been stung by a bee, she had drowned in the warm,bread-smelling kitchen air, and Candy Bill had licked her dyingtears from her swollen cheeks.

“Big fish!” the man in the black suit cried in a guttural, greedyvoice. “Oh, biiig fiiish!”

He snatched it away from me and crammed it into a mouth thatopened wider than any human mouth ever could. Many years later,when I was sixty-five (I know it was sixty-five because that was the

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summer I retired from teaching), I went to the New England Aquar-ium and finally saw a shark. The mouth of the man in the black suitwas like that shark’s mouth when it opened, only his gullet was blaz-ing red, the same color as his awful eyes, and I felt heat bake out of itand into my face, the way you feel a sudden wave of heat come push-ing out of a fireplace when a dry piece of wood catches alight. And Ididn’t imagine that heat, either, I know I didn’t, because just beforehe slid the head of my nineteen-inch brook trout between his gapingjaws, I saw the scales along the sides of the fish rise up and begin tocurl like bits of paper floating over an open incinerator.

He slid the fish in like a man in a travelling show swallowing asword. He didn’t chew, and his blazing eyes bulged out, as if in effort.The fish went in and went in, his throat bulged as it slid down his gul-let, and now he began to cry tears of his own . . . except his tears wereblood, scarlet and thick.

I think it was the sight of those bloody tears that gave me my bodyback. I don’t know why that should have been, but I think it was. Ibolted to my feet like a jack released from its box, turned with mybamboo pole still in one hand, and fled up the bank, bending over andtearing tough bunches of weeds out with my free hand in an effort toget up the slope more quickly.

He made a strangled, furious noise—the sound of any man withhis mouth too full—and I looked back just as I got to the top. Hewas coming after me, the back of his suit-coat flapping and his thingold watch-chain flashing and winking in the sun. The tail of the fishwas still protruding from his mouth and I could smell the rest of it,roasting in the oven of his throat.

He reached for me, groping with his talons, and I fled along thetop of the bank. After a hundred yards or so I found my voice andwent to screaming—screaming in fear, of course, but also screamingin grief for my beautiful dead mother.

He was coming along after me. I could hear snapping branchesand whipping bushes, but I didn’t look back again. I lowered myhead, slitted my eyes against the bushes and low-hanging branchesalong the stream’s bank, and ran as fast as I could. And at every step

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I expected to feel his hands descending on my shoulders pulling meback into a final hot hug.

That didn’t happen. Some unknown length of time later—itcouldn’t have been longer than five or ten minutes, I suppose, but itseemed like forever—I saw the bridge through layerings of leaves andfirs. Still screaming, but breathlessly now, sounding like a teakettlewhich has almost boiled dry, I reached this second, steeper bank andcharged up to it.

Halfway to the top I slipped to my knees, looked over my shoulder,and saw the man in the black suit almost at my heels, his white facepulled into a convulsion of fury and greed. His cheeks were splatteredwith his bloody tears and his shark’s mouth hung open like a hinge.

“Fisherboy!” he snarled, and started up the bank after me, graspingat my foot with one long hand. I tore free, turned, and threw my fish-ing pole at him. He batted it down easily, but it tangled his feet upsomehow and he went to his knees. I didn’t wait to see anymore; Iturned and bolted to the top of the slope. I almost slipped at the verytop, but managed to grab one of the support struts running beneaththe bridge and save myself.

“You can’t get away, fisherboy!” he cried from behind me. Hesounded furious, but he also sounded as if he were laughing. “Ittakes more than a mouthful of trout to fill me up!”

“Leave me alone!” I screamed back at him. I grabbed the bridge’srailing and threw myself over it in a clumsy somersault, filling myhands with splinters and bumping my head so hard on the boardswhen I came down that I saw stars. I rolled over onto my belly andbegan crawling. I lurched to my feet just before I got to the end of thebridge, stumbled once, found my rhythm, and then began to run. Iran as only nine-year-old boys can run, which is like the wind. It feltas if my feet only touched the ground with every third or fourth stride,and for all I know, that may be true. I ran straight up the righthandwheelrut in the road, ran until my temples pounded and my eyespulsed in their sockets, ran until I had a hot stitch in my left side fromthe bottom of my ribs to my armpit, ran until I could taste blood andsomething like metal-shavings in the back of my throat. When I

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couldn’t run anymore I stumbled to a stop and looked back over myshoulder, puffing and blowing like a windbroke horse. I was convincedI would see him standing right there behind me in his natty black suit,the watch-chain a glittering loop across his vest and not a hair out ofplace.

But he was gone. The road stretching back toward Castle Streambetween the darkly massed pines and spruces was empty. And yet Isensed him somewhere near in those woods, watching me with hisgrassfire eyes, smelling of burnt matches and roasted fish.

I turned and began walking as fast as I could, limping a little—I’dpulled muscles in both legs, and when I got out of bed the next morn-ing I was so sore I could barely walk. I didn’t notice those things then,though. I just kept looking over my shoulder, needing again and againto verify that the road behind me was still empty. It was, each time Ilooked, but those backward glances seemed to increase my fearrather than lessening it. The firs looked darker, massier, and I keptimagining what lay behind the trees which marched beside theroad—long, tangled corridors of forest, leg-breaking deadfalls,ravines where anything might live. Until that Saturday in 1914, I hadthought that bears were the worst thing the forest could hold.

Now I knew better.

A mile or so further up the road, just beyond the place where it cameout of the woods and joined the Geegan Flat Road, I saw my fatherwalking toward me and whistling “The Old Oaken Bucket.” He wascarrying his own rod, the one with the fancy spinning reel from Mon-key Ward. In his other hand he had his creel, the one with the ribbonmy mother had woven through the handle back when Dan was stillalive. DEDICATED TO JESUS, that ribbon said. I had been walking butwhen I saw him I started to run again, screaming Dad! Dad! Dad! atthe top of my lungs and staggering from side to side on my tired,sprung legs like a drunken sailor. The expression of surprise on his facewhen he recognized me might have been comical under other cir-cumstances, but not under these. He dropped his rod and creel intothe road without so much as a downward glance at them and ran to

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me. It was the fastest I ever saw my Dad run in his life; when we cametogether it was a wonder the impact didn’t knock us both senseless,and I struck my face on his belt-buckle hard enough to start a littlenosebleed. I didn’t notice that until later, though. Right then I onlyreached out my arms and clutched him as hard as I could. I held onand rubbed my hot face back and forth against his belly, covering hisold blue workshirt with blood and tears and snot.

“Gary, what is it? What happened? Are you all right?” “Ma’s dead!” I sobbed. “I met a man in the woods and he told me!

Ma’s dead! She got stung by a bee and it swelled her all up just likewhat happened to Dan, and she’s dead! She’s on the kitchen floor andCandy Bill . . . licked the t-t-tears . . . off her . . . off her . . .”

Face was the last word I had to say, but by then my chest was hitch-ing so bad I couldn’t get it out. My tears were flowing again, and myDad’s startled, frightened face had blurred into three overlappingimages. I began to howl—not like a little kid who’s skun his knee butlike a dog that’s seen something bad by moonlight—and my fatherpressed my head against his hard flat stomach again. I slipped outfrom under his hand, though, and looked back over my shoulder. Iwanted to make sure the man in the black suit wasn’t coming.There was no sign of him; the road winding back into the woods wascompletely empty. I promised myself I would never go back downthat road again, not ever, no matter what, and I suppose now God’sgreatest blessing to His creatures below is that they can’t see thefuture. It might have broken my mind if I had known I would be goingback down that road, and not two hours later. For that moment,though, I was only relieved to see we were still alone. Then I thoughtof my mother—my beautiful dead mother—and laid my face backagainst my father’s stomach and bawled some more.

“Gary, listen to me,” he said a moment or two later. I went on bawl-ing. He gave me a little longer to do that, then reached down andlifted my chin so he could look into my face and I could look into his.“Your Mom’s fine,” he said.

I could only look at him with tears streaming down my cheeks. Ididn’t believe him.

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“I don’t know who told you different, or what kind of dirty dogwould want to put a scare like that into a little boy, but I swear toGod your mother’s fine.”

“But . . . but he said . . .”“I don’t care what he said. I got back from Eversham’s earlier than

I expected—he doesn’t want to sell any cows, it’s all just talk—anddecided I had time to catch up with you. I got my pole and my creeland your mother made us a couple of jelly fold-overs. Her newbread. Still warm. So she was fine half an hour ago, Gary, and there’snobody knows any different that’s come from this direction, I guar-antee you. Not in just half an hour’s time.” He looked over myshoulder. “Who was this man? And where was he? I’m going to findhim and thrash him within an inch of his life.”

I thought a thousand things in just two seconds—that’s what itseemed like, anyway—but the last thing I thought was the mostpowerful: if my Dad met up with the man in the black suit, I didn’tthink my Dad would be the one to do the thrashing. Or the walkingaway.

I kept remembering those long white fingers, and the talons atthe ends of them.

“Gary?”“I don’t know that I remember,” I said.“Were you where the stream splits? The big rock?”I could never lie to my father when he asked a direct question—

not to save his life or mine. “Yes, but don’t go down there.” I seizedhis arm with both hands and tugged it hard. “Please don’t. He wasa scary man.” Inspiration struck like an illuminating lightning-bolt.“I think he had a gun.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “Maybe there wasn’t a man,” hesaid, lifting his voice a little on the last word and turning it into some-thing that was almost but not quite a question. “Maybe you fell asleepwhile you were fishing, son, and had a bad dream. Like the ones youhad about Danny last winter.”

I had had a lot of bad dreams about Dan last winter, dreamswhere I would open the door to our closet or to the dark, fruity inte-

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rior of the cider shed and see him standing there and looking at meout of his purple strangulated face; from many of these dreams I hadawakened screaming, and awakened my parents, as well. I had fallenasleep on the bank of the stream for a little while, too—dozed off, any-way—but I hadn’t dreamed and I was sure I had awakened just beforethe man in the black suit clapped the bee dead, sending it tumblingoff my nose and into my lap. I hadn’t dreamed him the way I haddreamed Dan, I was quite sure of that, although my meeting with himhad already attained a dreamlike quality in my mind, as I supposesupernatural occurrences always must. But if my Dad thought thatthe man had only existed in my own head, that might be better. Bet-ter for him.

“It might have been, I guess,” I said.“Well, we ought to go back and find your rod and your creel.”He actually started in that direction, and I had to tug frantically

at his arm to stop him again, and turn him back toward me.“Later,” I said. “Please, Dad? I want to see Mother. I’ve got to see

her with my own eyes.”He thought that over, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose you do. We’ll

go home first, and get your rod and creel later.”So we walked back to the farm together, my father with his fish-

pole propped on his shoulder just like one of my friends, me carryinghis creel, both of us eating folded-over slices of my mother’s breadsmeared with blackcurrant jam.

“Did you catch anything?” he asked as we came in sight of thebarn.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “A rainbow. Pretty good-sized.” And a brookie thatwas a lot bigger, I thought but didn’t say. Biggest one I ever saw, to tell thetruth, but I don’t have that one to show you, Dad. I gave that one to the manin the black suit, so he wouldn’t eat me. And it worked . . . but just barely.

“That’s all? Nothing else?”“After I caught it I fell asleep.” This was not really an answer, but

not really a lie, either.“Lucky you didn’t lose your pole. You didn’t, did you, Gary?”“No, sir,” I said, very reluctantly. Lying about that would do no

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good even if I’d been able to think up a whopper—not if he was seton going back to get my creel anyway, and I could see by his face thathe was.

Up ahead, Candy Bill came racing out of the back door, barking hisshrill bark and wagging his whole rear end back and forth the wayScotties do when they’re excited. I couldn’t wait any longer; hope andanxiety bubbled up in my throat like foam. I broke away from myfather and ran to the house, still lugging his creel and still convinced,in my heart of hearts, that I was going to find my mother dead on thekitchen floor with her face swelled and purple like Dan’s had beenwhen my father carried him in from the west field, crying and callingthe name of Jesus.

But she was standing at the counter, just as well and fine as whenI had left her, humming a song as she shelled peas into a bowl. Shelooked around at me, first in surprise and then in fright as she took inmy wide eyes and pale cheeks.

“Gary, what is it? What’s the matter?”I didn’t answer, only ran to her and covered her with kisses. At

some point my father came in and said, “Don’t worry, Lo—he’s allright. He just had one of his bad dreams, down there by the brook.”

“Pray God it’s the last of them,” she said, and hugged me tighterwhile Candy Bill danced around our feet, barking his shrill bark.

“You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to, Gary,” myfather said, although he had already made it clear that he thought Ishould—that I should go back, that I should face my fear, as I supposefolks would say nowadays. That’s very well for fearful things that aremake-believe, but two hours hadn’t done much to change my con-viction that the man in the black suit had been real. I wouldn’t be ableto convince my father of that, though. I don’t think there was a nine-year-old that ever lived who would have been able to convince hisfather he’d seen the Devil come walking out of the woods in a blacksuit.

“I’ll come,” I said. I had walked out of the house to join him beforehe left, mustering all my courage in order to get my feet moving, and

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now we were standing by the chopping-block in the side yard, not farfrom the woodpile.

“What you got behind your back?” he asked.I brought it out slowly. I would go with him, and I would hope the

man in the black suit with the arrow-straight part down the left sideof his head was gone . . . but if he wasn’t, I wanted to be prepared. Asprepared as I could be, anyway. I had the family Bible in the hand Ihad brought out from behind my back. I’d set out just to bring myNew Testament, which I had won for memorizing the most psalms inthe Thursday night Youth Fellowship competition (I managed eight,although most of them except the Twenty-third had floated out of mymind in a week’s time), but the little red Testament didn’t seem likeenough when you were maybe going to face the Devil himself, noteven when the words of Jesus were marked out in red ink.

My father looked at the old Bible, swelled with family documentsand pictures, and I thought he’d tell me to put it back, but he didn’t.A look of mixed grief and sympathy crossed his face, and he nodded.“All right,” he said. “Does your mother know you took that?”

“No, sir.”He nodded again. “Then we’ll hope she doesn’t spot it gone

before we get back. Come on. And don’t drop it.”

Half an hour or so later, the two of us stood on the bank lookingdown at the place where Castle Stream forked, and at the flat placewhere I’d had my encounter with the man with the red-orange eyes.I had my bamboo rod in my hand—I’d picked it up below thebridge—and my creel lay down below, on the flat place. Its wickertop was flipped back. We stood looking down, my father and I, for along time, and neither of us said anything.

Opal! Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary’s lemonade! That hadbeen his unpleasant little poem, and once he had recited it, he hadthrown himself on his back, laughing like a child who has just dis-covered he has enough courage to say bathroom words like shit orpiss. The flat place down there was as green and lush as any place inMaine that the sun can get to in early July . . . except where the

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stranger had lain. There the grass was dead and yellow in the shapeof a man.

I looked down and saw I was holding our lumpy old family Biblestraight out in front of me with both thumbs pressing so hard on thecover that they were white. It was the way Mama Sweet’s husbandNorville held a willow-fork when he was trying to dowse somebodya well.

“Stay here,” my father said at last, and skidded sideways down thebank, digging his shoes into the rich soft soil and holding his arms outfor balance. I stood where I was, holding the Bible stiffly out at theends of my arms like a willow-fork, my heart thumping wildly. I don’tknow if I had a sense of being watched that time or not; I was tooscared to have a sense of anything, except for a sense of wanting to befar away from that place and those woods.

My Dad bent down, sniffed at where the grass was dead, and gri-maced. I knew what he was smelling: something like burnt matches.Then he grabbed my creel and came on back up the bank, hurrying.He snagged one fast look over his shoulder to make sure nothing wascoming along behind. Nothing was. When he handed me the creel,the lid was still hanging back on its cunning little leather hinges. Ilooked inside and saw nothing but two handfuls of grass.

“Thought you said you caught a rainbow,” my father said, “butmaybe you dreamed that, too.”

Something in his voice stung me. “No, sir,” I said. “I caught one.”“Well, it sure as hell didn’t flop out, not if it was gutted and

cleaned. And you wouldn’t put a catch into your fisherbox withoutdoing that, would you, Gary? I taught you better than that.”

“Yes, sir, you did, but—”“So if you didn’t dream catching it and if it was dead in the box,

something must have come along and eaten it,” my father said, andthen he grabbed another quick glance over his shoulder, eyes wide, asif he had heard something move in the woods. I wasn’t exactly sur-prised to see drops of sweat standing out on his forehead like big clearjewels. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I was for that, and we went back along the bank to the bridge,

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walking quick without speaking. When we got there, my Daddropped to one knee and examined the place where we’d found myrod. There was another patch of dead grass there, and the lady’sslipper was all brown and curled in on itself, as if a blast of heat hadcharred it. While my father did this, I looked in my empty creel.

“He must have gone back and eaten my other fish, too,” I said.My father looked up at me. “Other fish!”“Yes, sir. I didn’t tell you, but I caught a brookie, too. A big one.

He was awful hungry, that fella.” I wanted to say more, and the wordstrembled just behind my lips, but in the end I didn’t.

We climbed up to the bridge and helped one another over the rail-ing. My father took my creel, looked into it, then went to the railingand threw it over. I came up beside him in time to see it splash downand float away like a boat, riding lower and lower in the stream asthe water poured in between the wicker weavings.

“It smelled bad,” my father said, but he didn’t look at me whenhe said it, and his voice sounded oddly defensive. It was the onlytime I ever heard him speak just that way.

“Yes, sir.”“We’ll tell your mother we couldn’t find it. If she asks. If she

doesn’t ask, we won’t tell her anything.”“No, sir, we won’t.”And she didn’t and we didn’t and that’s the way it was.

That day in the woods is eighty-one years gone, and for many of theyears in between I have never even thought of it . . . not awake, atleast. Like any other man or woman who ever lived, I can’t sayabout my dreams, not for sure. But now I’m old, and I dream awake,it seems. My infirmities have crept up like waves which will soon takea child’s abandoned sand castle, and my memories have also crept up,making me think of some old rhyme that went, in part, “Just leavethem alone/And they’ll come home/Wagging their tails behindthem.” I remember meals I ate, games I played, girls I kissed in theschool cloakroom when we played Post Office, boys I chummedwith, the first drink I ever took, the first cigarette I ever smoked (corn-

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shuck behind Dicky Hammer’s pig-shed, and I threw up). Yet of allthe memories, the one of the man in the black suit is the strongest,and glows with its own spectral, haunted light. He was real, he wasthe Devil, and that day I was either his errand or his luck. I feel moreand more strongly that escaping him was my luck—just luck, and notthe intercession of the God I have worshipped and sung hymns to allmy life.

As I lie here in my nursing-home room, and in the ruined sand cas-tle that is my body, I tell myself that I need not fear the Devil—thatI have lived a good, kindly life, and I need not fear the Devil. Some-times I remind myself that it was I, not my father, who finallycoaxed my mother back to church later on that summer. In thedark, however, these thoughts have no power to ease or comfort. Inthe dark comes a voice which whispers that the nine-year-old boy Iwas had done nothing for which he might legitimately fear the devileither . . . and yet the Devil came. And in the dark I sometimes hearthat voice drop even lower, into ranges which are inhuman. Big fish!it whispers in tones of hushed greed, and all the truths of the moralworld fall to ruin before its hunger. Biiig fiiish!

The Devil came to me once, long ago; suppose he were to comeagain now? I am too old to run now; I can’t even get to the bath-room and back without my walker. I have no fine large brook troutwith which to propitiate him, either, even for a moment or two; I amold and my creel is empty. Suppose he were to come back and findme so?

And suppose he is still hungry?

My favorite Nathaniel Hawthorne story is “Young GoodmanBrown.” I think it’s one of the ten best stories ever written by anAmerican. “The Man in the Black Suit” is my hommage to it.As for the particulars, I was talking with a friend of mine one day,and he happened to mention that his Grandpa believed—trulybelieved—that he had seen the Devil in the woods, back aroundthe turn of the twentieth century. Grandpa said the Devil came

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